How to use GetResponse as a nonprofit: 9 practical ways

You’re making this world a better place. Instead of sitting and waiting, you decided to take action for a great cause.

But to fulfill your mission and achieve your goals, your nonprofit organization needs a solid communication program.

And this means marketing. Raising awareness about your cause, acquiring and retaining donors, attracting and engaging volunteers, or promoting your events — these are just some of the most fundamental goals your marketing has to meet.

This is not a walk in the park, especially when budget and resources are scarce.

But here’s the good news — with the right software, you can handle these activities, saving you a lot of time and money!

Let’s find out how!

GetResponse — Your nonprofit’s marketing ally

Marketing can be overwhelming. There are tons of strategies, approaches, campaign and content types, and tools. We could spend hours just mentioning the names of marketing software. Many of these SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms serve specific marketing activities, while others are more comprehensive.

Let’s face it: buying several of these tools and building a complex tech stack for your marketing needs would be costly, time-consuming, and complicated.

But it doesn’t have to be! With GetResponse, you can cover a wide array of aspects without spending a fortune or increasing your marketing team’s headcount!

In this article, we’ll walk you through the most powerful features your nonprofit can easily put into play!

However, before we get there, I’d like to highlight that GetResponse offers a robust tool and a 50% discount to nonprofit organizations on all its standard plans. Want to benefit today? Apply for the discount today!

From the ground up — Build your nonprofit’s online presence

First, let’s lay the groundwork. Before you start promoting events, sending media releases, or posting eye-catching videos on social media, you need to look after your digital real estate.

After reading this chapter, you’ll know how to build your website, landing pages, sign-up forms, and more!

1. Create a website for your NGO

There’s a chance you already have a website up and running. If that’s the case with your organization, feel free to skip to the next subchapter. But if you’re still at the starting line with this — or you want to rebuild your website from scratch — then you couldn’t be in a better place!

You can do many amazing things with GetResponse, and creating a neat website is one of them. With our Website Builder, you can build a fully functional and user-friendly website that will:

• Build your credibility and trust in the eyes of your donors, volunteers, and media
• Fully describe your cause and how your nonprofit operates
• Provide an educational knowledge base and a list of your upcoming events
• Have your mission, team, and contact details in one place

To make this happen, you can pick one of our predesigned nonprofit website templates and customize it with your logo, colors, and images. The simple drag-and-drop editor will make the whole process fast and fun!

And if you want to save even more time, you can try our AI builder to take care of the entire process for you! All you need to do is instruct our AI tool with a specific prompt and make a few choices along the way.

Whichever path you choose, remember that the mindful message you convey on your website will play a crucial role.

2. Build landing pages for individual campaigns

Only three minutes. That’s how “long” it took one of the biggest charity organizations in Poland to create a landing page using GetResponse. Their page about the Poland Rock Festival was not only visually appealing but also highly successful in terms of campaign performance — 51,488 signups and a 41.74% signup rate speak for themselves.

With our landing page toolkit, you can craft compelling and effective landing pages for various occasions:

• Your upcoming events
• Donation campaigns
• Specific volunteer opportunities

Why is it a great idea to build these pages with GetResponse? You can select from over 100 professionally designed templates, customize them the way you like, optimize them for search engines, and even track their analytics which version of your page will move the needle!

Related: The ultimate guide to nonprofit landing pages

3. Build an audience and announce offers with forms and popups

Whether your nonprofit focuses on mental health advocacy or domestic violence prevention, your marketing goals should be education and expanding your reach.

How can you handle both? By sending regular newsletters and organizing online and onsite events. And to get people to opt in to your email list and to register for your webinars and meetups, you need…

Exactly! Signup forms and popups! By implementing these on your website, you open your doors wide for newcomers — journalists, activists, or potential donors!

The best part is that you can set these up with GetResponse in a flash! All you need to do is customize a template, define who will see your popup, and specify when or after what action it will appear.

4. Grow smartly with integrated tools and apps

At its core, GetResponse comes with a wide array of features, making it already a comprehensive solution for entire marketing departments. But what’s even better is that it connects with over 170 third-party tools and apps, so you can achieve much more at this setup stage.

Let’s have a quick overview of some of them:

• WordPress — If you’ve already built your website on WordPress, implementing this integration should be first on your to-do list. With this plugin, you can add your WordPress contacts directly to your email list in GetResponse, or track visits to your website.
• Donorbox — To leverage the integration between this robust online fundraising platform and GetResponse, you need to have accounts in both places. Perks? Creating donation forms and buttons you can embed on GetResponse landing pages, and running crowdfunding campaigns.
• Zapier or Make — The sky’s the limit with these two tools! By integrating with one of them, you can connect to thousands of apps on a “trigger-action” basis. Example? Running a survey on Google Forms can translate into an automation action in GetResponse.
• Google Analytics — To know which marketing campaign delivers results, you need to look after your analytics first. By integrating GetResponse Email Analytics with Google Analytics, you will get the full picture of your subscribers’ behavior and better track the traffic to your website.

From newsletters to webinars — Educate and inspire your audience

Awareness, education, and advocacy — these three words are the Autism Partnership Foundation (APF)’s north star, and they should be this chapter’s official motto.

Let’s dive into the set of GetResponse features that will help you educate your audience, engage activists and donors, and — at the end of the day — turn into drumming up fundraising results or boosting your events’ attendance.

5. Start your newsletter program

Search engines change, social media algorithms change, but newsletters remain one of the top-performing content distribution channels. As long as they deliver value, tell engaging stories, and maintain an attractive form, your newsletters can create strong bonds between your nonprofit and your audience.

Or should we say audiences, because you can divide your email marketing program into four (or more) subsets:

• For donors
• For supporters
• For volunteers
• For media

Each of these newsletter campaigns will require a slightly different approach when it comes to angle and messaging. That said, you’ll need to create an editorial calendar listing topics tailored for different readers.

Once you have that in place, you can move to the technical part. GetResponse has been an email marketing platform from day one, so you can’t go wrong here! First, it will allow you to group your subscribers into separate mailing lists. Second, each time you craft your next newsletter, you can add a predefined list or segment.

For example, the type of newsletter below would be ideal for sending to the donors segment:

As for the creation side, designing newsletters in GetResponse is a pure pleasure! Dozens of predesigned and blank templates are at your fingertips, waiting for you to customize them with a drag-and-drop editor.

6. Achieve more with drip campaigns

“Brand recognizability and emotional ties to it have a significant impact on people’s engagement. Our audience is attached to the foundation and its cause. We send out valuable information to specific groups of contacts thanks to list segmentation.” — This is exactly what you can achieve, thanks to an ongoing newsletter program. (Check out the full case study here.)

But imagine your results if you create an advanced, solid sequence of emails that will take your subscribers from the moment they opt in to the desired action, like becoming a volunteer or placing a donation.

Here’s an example of a drip campaign targeted at potential volunteers:

1. Welcome email: “Join Us in Making a Difference!” — mission overview
2. “See the Change We’re Creating Together” — Stories and statistics of your nonprofit
3. “Discover Your Perfect Volunteer Role” — List of current volunteer positions
4. “Meet Sarah, Our Star Volunteer” — A story of a current, successful volunteer
5. “Ready to Change Lives? Here’s How to Start” — Call-to-action

Sounds like a plan? Time to put it into play with GetResponse’s autoresponders feature! You can design your emails, assign them to a particular mailing list, and define when exactly they will go out.

7. Scale up with marketing automation

Yes, your email marketing can become more effective and advanced — even if you are a marketing team of one, and engineering is not your cup of tea!

Imagine this — you want to send personalized emails to specific groups of subscribers, at a specific time, and after someone takes a desired action. For instance, a potential donor downloads your recent report. You want to grab that opportunity and send out a message with a video success story.

The scenarios are countless, and doing all that manually would take forever! The good news is, GetResponse comes to the rescue with its marketing automation!

Armed with this toolkit, you can build numerous automation workflows, where you define what’s going to happen after which action. What’s even better, you can escape the blank page doom and handpick already designed templates, grouped in categories like welcome or engagement and retention.

Let’s say you want to win back subscribers who haven’t been reacting to your emails for a while. Creating a workflow with two or three emails will help you re-engage with them, or remove some of them from the list if they keep ignoring you anyway. That way, you will ensure your email list consists of people who are still interested in what you say and do.

8. Build deeper connections through webinars

Loved and valued by marketers, salespeople, and businesses across the board, webinars are one of the most versatile and successful content formats.

Packed with multimedia tools like whiteboard, presentations, video, screen sharing, and engagement features such as polls, surveys, chat, and Q&A, these online events can help you:

• Increase your subscriber base
• Build awareness around your cause
• Promote a specific action or event
• Convert your existing subscribers into active volunteers or donors

Let’s not be afraid to admit it — webinars require time and dedication. But it pays off, for sure!

Imagine your ideal webinar topic: “Investing in Minds: How Your Support Transforms Mental Health Care”. You spread the word about it on social media and send invitations to your subscribers. Boom! 267 people registered, out of which 136 came from social media. This means that those folks instantly became your new email contacts!

At the end of this event, you will display a call-to-action banner saying: “Transform a Life Today: Your Support Matters”. The result? As many as 47 attendees decided to become one-time donors!

What’s equally exciting is that one webinar powers you up with tons of content:

• A webinar recording you can publish on YouTube
• A series of shorter videos for all social media channels
• At least one blog post
• A set of infographics and quote banners
• At least one newsletter, and much more!

And finally — you can organize, promote, and run webinars within the same platform — GetResponse!

9. Connect in real-time through live chat

The last GetResponse feature that we want to introduce to you is Live Chat. Opening a real-time communication channel on a website is no longer just a signal that a company has a modern approach. A chat window has become table stakes.

Imagine this: Potential volunteers stumble upon your website, and your cause is exactly what they’re after. They want to reach out, but an old-school “leave your email, and we will contact you” is not enough. They need their answers now.

This is where our Live Chat tool comes in handy. You can set it up with just a few clicks, add your branding elements and avatar, a welcome message, and auto-replies.

Handling this communication channel in GetResponse is comprehensive, starting from creating messages and triggers, through monitoring open chats, checking closed chats, up to going through your statistics on a super-neat performance dashboard.

And that’s a wrap

“It is just so efficient. It saves us so much time, so many resources.” — this is what Ana Becerra from the Autism Partnership Foundation says about GetResponse.

It’s all true. With just one platform, you can manage an entire marketing program for your nonprofit, saving you hours of work. And the best part? It’s a budget-friendly solution, because GetResponse lends a helping hand to nonprofits, offering a 50% discount on all pricing plans!

Are you ready?